Cinnamon Jewellery

I finished these etched silver and green pearl earrings recently and took the opportunity yesterday when the sun came out to take a few photos. I used some of the silver I etched recently using nail art stamps and decided to try bezel setting some pearl beads I've had for absolutely years. Yes I did say beads! I bought the beads years ago from "somewhere" (can't remember). They were described as button pearls and they were shaped kind of like cabochons with a slight dome on one side and a flat base on the other and obviously had holes. Some of them were very flat on one side and very domed on the other which is what gave me the idea to use them as cabs. This photo of a few of the beads was taken under a day light bulb so the colours are a bit off but they are all lovely icy pastel shades of pink, green, apricot, pale blue, purple and grey which look great contrasted with oxidized copper and silver. I sorted through them and removed the ones whose holes were...

A few weeks ago I received an email from Nathalie who works at Kernowcraft . She said she'd been doing "geeky" things and had noticed several views to the Kernowcraft website that she traced to my own  Cinnamon Jewellery   website. I do have a page on my site where I've listed several of the places I buy my supplies from with links and did mention that I buy cabochons from Kernowcraft. As a thank you Nathalie very kindly suggested that they include one of my pieces of jewellery on their Gallery of Jewellery Ideas page. I was thrilled to be honest and thought it was really nice of her! I chose my silver hollow form pendant with turquoise cabochon and I noticed today it's there in all it's glory! You can find the Gallery by clicking the "Jewellery Making Tips" link in the top navigation bar on the Kernowcraft website........ I took a screen shot of it too (can you tell I'm excited?!)

I recently finished my first sterling silver hollow form pendant. In my last post I said how much I love the look of hollow form pieces - the 3D solidness of them despite being hollow. Anyway I still love them after making my first version in silver! I didn't take any photos this time but I promise to do so next time when I'm planning to make another one with a bezel set cab on the front. I used 24g/0.5mm sheet that I etched using nail varnish as the resist to create a dot pattern. I used a small brush for the nail varnish and managed to get it all over my fingers (course I did). I discovered you get a neater, rounder dot (which is so important to me because I'm slightly weird!) if you load the brush so it's almost but not quite dripping, hence the messy fingers. I bought some 5mm 24g/0.5mm strip from Cookson Gold for the frame or walls of the hollow form which is a bit extravagant I suppose as I could cut it myself but it just makes it a bit quicker to do. I fou...

This Tuesday night (14th May) is the last week of my silver jewellery course. I feel a bit sad to be honest as I've met some lovely people and had a lot of fun. I've also learned stuff! The main reason I went on the course was to learn how to bezel set and hopefully to become more confident with soldering and piercing. Well I certainly feel a lot better when I'm sawing and piercing now. I don't have a proper jeweller's workbench and have to make do with working on the diningroom table and in the kitchen so sawing metal was a bit of a challenge as the table is too low. I used to resort to sitting on a silly little plastic stool and feeling uncomfortable and a bit stressed about it all. Then I thought it might help if I used a G-clamp to attach my bench peg to the table instead of the metal clamp that came with it (that I'd managed to bend out of shape!) and use my computer chair to sit on as I can adjust the height. The result - a much better position and ...